We are going to look at a song called Brainstorm from Special Request. This is an techno-like song which has a lot of changes troughout the song. There is some piano involved and some singing, however not troughout the whole song. Therefore it is difficult to see something out of the chroma plot, as it’s not as easy as with classical music. This can be seen from the chroma plot. On the x-axis we have the time and on the y-axis the chroma. It’s hard to conclude anything from this plot at all.
The timbre shows a little bit better what’s going on. The song starts with a slow buildup with some high heads and some minimal vocals (Kicking up in the brainstorm), which you can see in the beginning. Then you can see a very big change around 60 seconds, this is where a very heavy bass kicks in. It also shows a single weird moment around 240 seconds, this is because here there is 1 small sample of a vocal which has not been in the song before and is only played here.
The chroma plot did not give us much information, however the Chroma SSM gives us loads of info. On the x-axis and the y-axis we can see the names describing the start of a new music block. For instance, the song starts with a slow buildup at 0 sec untill around 60 sec (1:00), here a new block starts with some heavy bass, then at 100 sec (1:40) the block is still the same as before, but the high heads kick in. At 130 sec (2:10) the Piano block starts, where at 190 sec (3:08) the Bass block with high heads is repeated. Then at 244 sec (4:05) the Piano block is repeated and at 305 sec (5:02) the autro block starts.
Listen to the file to find out!